All posts filed under: Embroidery

The vyshyvanka that I started earlier this year has been finished! I finished it in September a few weeks before the baby arrived in October, but didn’t get a chance to post about it until now, (turns out newborns are pretty demanding). I’m quite pleased with how the shirt turned out. I basically followed the steps I outlined in my last post to make it. I completed the central section first, then the sleeve cuffs, then the collar. The most difficult part was working out an appropriate pattern for the collar & cuffs, once I’d completed the embroidery on the front of the shirt. I did a lot of trials on a scrap of linen to try to find a scaled down version of the main panel. Eventually I happened upon a design I was happy with & went with that. For this project I really didn’t want to use the overlocker (serger) because I felt it would look to ‘machine made’ so the seams are flat felled. I did run a zig-zag stitch along …

I’m pregnant with my first child, a little boy. I really wanted to make something special for him that could be worn for special occasions & then kept or passed down later in life. As my husband is Ukrainian, the obvious choice was a vyshyvanka, (an embroidered shirt worn in Ukrainian national dress). I’ve made a pinterest board of some of my favorite examples (including some more modern examples) here. I’ve never made a vyshyvanka before & had to rely on my husband explaining to me the ways he’d seen other women make them. Based on that, turns out there’s a few ways of making a vyshyvanka, with varying degrees of time & effort. The easiest way he described to me was to buy the embroidered panels & then affix them to an existing shirt. A more involved (but still relatively easy) option is to embroider the panels onto specific embroidery/needlepoint evenweave cloth & then cut out the panels & sew them onto a shirt. The most difficult method he described to me was embroidering directly onto the material …